Disney Afternoon: Bonkers:: Reload
by The Corpse of One Legato
Summary: Bonkers and Miranda find themselves forced to work with one of their greatest nemesis, Ms. DuPrave, to find a missing anti-toon weapon.
1. Stolen Weapon

[Excuse my spelling, as it has been years since I saw this show, and I've never actually seen official spellings for several of these character's names.]

Started out as a Bonkers fan fiction, but will include other "Disney Afternoon" shows later as well.

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It was past eight when Janet finally finished the last of her work, scrubbing and tidying the labs to shining perfection. The fifty-six year old woman had found employment twenty years ago at DuPrave industries under the current president, Lilth DuPrave's, father. Wiping back a drop of sweat from her brow, she packed up her mop and broom and returned them to the storage closet.

Twenty long years… if the much rumored round of layoffs went through, what would be left for her? She'd never finished college and her only skills and benefits came from her seniority at her position. Which, it seemed, as exactly the reason they wanted to put her neck on the chopping block. Youths coming in didn't need as much medication and could be more easily coerced into an HMO than older, medication-dependent worn down bodies like her own.

A small skittering sound caught her attention. Thinking fast, in a split second she brought her heavy boot down on the white tile floor. One, two, three, four, there, she'd got it. Disgusting little beasts, cockroaches, she thought to herself as she wiped black bug goo off the bottom of her shoe. Served no purpose at all in the world.

Shortly after the lights went out, a silver cockroach slid out from beneath one of the counters. The bug crawled across the floor, moving in a highly directed fashion from its hiding place, up the side of a research table, and across the glittering surface of a mirror.

Moonlight coming in through the security-bared windows illuminated the mirror, turning it a silvery-blue everywhere except the one black spot marred by the presence of the cockroach. 

The cockroach had other things on its mind, however, than whether or not it was pretty. Slowly, it moved across the mirror, leaving an unnatural path of a slimy wet substance where it crawled.

Around nine-p.m. a design began to emerge from the silver of the mirror, cast in white by the substance dripped from the oddly behaving cockroach.

Around midnight, an arm and head emerged from the surface of the looking glass.

~

"So what do you think, Miranda? Could a toon be responsible?"

"Why are you asking me?" she asked, looking up at Denis from her work desk. Miranda Wright was one of two officers assigned to the Hollywood branch of the LAPD. She was an athletic, medium-tall blonde with sparkling, crisp blue eyes. Her name was no coincidence; her late father had been a police officer himself and an avid fan of humorous names. 

Her partner, on the other hand, was a short and rather fuzzy orange and black spotted bobcat named Bonkers. Although anyone watching the two of them work wouldn't have known it, he was actually the "senior" partner when it came to the Toon Division. His previous partner, a rotund little man by the name of Lucky, had gotten a prime position with the FBI, taking off for Washington D.C. to complete training. 

Miranda had been assigned to keeping the volatile little toon under control. For as little as their immediate supervisor, an sergeant with the strangely appropriate last name of Grating liked it, he was really the only reason Toon Division was capable of getting things done. And in a city as full of unemployed toons as Hollywood, maintaining a resemblance of order was important.

"No sign of forced entry anywhere, and that place is loaded with security equipment. It would have taken a Mission Impossible style genius to avoid all the laser eyes and break all the password-protected access codes on the doors."

"Sounds like an inside job to me," Miranda answered, shaking her head as she dragged her fingers through her impossibly straight, shoulder-length hair. "Not something that I'd immediately pin on a toon."

"I was just thinking a toon could do that whole 'zip zip' flattening the body thing and get under the doors, you know, and we're supposed to follow up on every lead."

Miranda smiled at him, looking up from the papers. "You don't give up easily, do you?"

"Of course not. That's how I got you to finally agree to go out with me in the first place," the blue-eyed brunette grinned, leaning over to give her a quick peck on the cheek. "Will you at least ask your partner what he thinks?"

"When he gets back from the attack of the mutant lunch, I will."

"Mutant lunch?"

Miranda laughed slightly, feeling bad because she knew she was laughing at the expense of her partner's pain. "I told him not to eat fruit he found in the back of an office refrigerator, but he never listens."

"Hey, am I giving you a ride home?"

Miranda paused, looking uncertain. "You won't forget this time, will you?"

Denis took her pale hand in his own rough, tanned hand. "I know this is hard on you, but I'm up for a big promotion in my division, and to prove I'm the right man for it I have to put in a little extra work here and there. I'm sorry I haven't been giving you the time you deserve, but think of the raise I'll get if I get the job. Then I can finally buy you…"

"A ring. I know. You've been promising so long your lines sound rehearsed," she answered, trying not to sound disgruntled but finding herself a bad actress. Embarrassed, she took her eyes off Denis to look over the evidence photographs in the envelope. She couldn't honestly tell if it looked like forced entry or not, as the police had been in and out of the doors themselves multiple times since the photographs were taken, had not the doors already been opened for the sheer sake of the evidence photography. 

"Miranda…" Denis whimpered in the background.

"You're forgiven, just don't forget," she muttered, engrossed in glossy images of a moment captured in time.

"I won't!" Denis called. She heard his shoes stomping up the crumbling, plaster-dust-coated stairway leading out of the Toon Division's basement "office." The truth was, they'd been shoved in the only office no one wanted simply so they were out of sight and of mind when the less-than-receptive mayor came to visit. That, and no one in the department honestly took them seriously, despite their impressive arrest rate.

Miranda studied the photographs of the office. Immaculate counters dominated by experimental equipment occupied most of the room, with a window on one wall, a shelving unit on a second wall, and a row of desks along the third visible wall. In fact, the only thing that looked out of place in the entire room were the empty spaces of paint that was slightly darker than the sun-faded paint around them. 

These spaces, Denis had told her, were where computers with millions of dollars worth of research information on them had previously sat. These computers were the obvious target of the robbery, as nothing else had even been so much as overturned.

"Or are they the target?" Miranda wondered aloud, tapping the eraser of her pencil against the photocopies. Something didn't seem right about it. What kind of criminal broke into a lab filled with high-value research supplies and drugs that would be worth their weight in gold on the street, only to take only one specific set of items?

She flipped over to the next photograph. The shelving wall and the desk wall were still visible, but the fourth wall had changed. It now contained a sink and a mirror. Must have been taken from the other end of the room, Miranda thought with a shrug.

Some kind of filmy substance seemed to have been spread in a smeary white mess across the front of the mirror. It looked almost like some kind of soap-scum residue to her. Funny, Miranda thought. The rest of the lab was cleaned almost obsessively. Why would the window be covered in soap slime residue? Was it the burglar's calling card?

But she was getting off topic, she realized. It wasn't her job to solve the crime, simply give it a once over and see if there were any indications that a toon had committed the robbery. Sure, soap scum all over the mirror seemed more a toon criminal's calling card than a human's, but good luck selling that to a jury. 

No visible paint marks on the bottom of the door, she noted. Sometimes larger toons would leave paint smears on objects they'd forced their oversized bodies to squeeze under. None of the liquid containing vials had been spilled, so if it had been a toon it hadn't been a clumsy one. 

Bonkers suddenly bounced in, gripping her around the neck and knocking her nearly face-first into her desk. It was only through her amazing reflexes that she managed to keep her cherry soda from tipping over, soaking the evidence files as well as the general papers lying all over her desk. Grating would NOT have been a very happy person about that at all. If the incident told her anything, however, it was that if a toon had robbed the labs, it hadn't been a toon anything like Bonkers.

"I thought you had a tummy ache," Miranda chided, swinging him around in front of her. 

"I did, but I'm better now," he grinned, bouncing in her lap.

Miranda laughed and shook her head, feeling her spirits lift slightly. Bonkers seemed to have that effect on human adults as well as children, a wonderful trait to possess in anyone, let alone a toon. "What am I going to do with you?" she asked.

"Buy me chocolate bon-bons?" he answered innocently, his eyes gleaming brightly as they looked into hers. He honestly seemed to expect that his request would be met.

"Sorry, B, I don't have any bon-bons right now. All I have is a pile of scattered photographs and a bunch of files to finish before I sleep."

"I'm sorry to hear that," the toon chimed, his voice overly spunky. "I'm going to go see what's up upstairs."

"Hold it!" Miranda said, grabbing him by his golf club like ears. "The correct answer is 'Gee, Miranda, that's a lot of work to get done! What can I do to help you?"

"But I'd only do it wrong, and then you'd have to redo it anyway, so isn't not helping you the best way I can help you?" Bonkers quickly replied, his black-brown eyes innocent of any knowledge that he was trying to pull a fast one on her.

Miranda sighed and shooed him away with a well-manicured hand. "When you're right, you're right. Just try not to bug the guys too much. Oh, and here," she said, rapidly stuffing Denis' photos back in the manila envelope. "Take this back to Denis, tell him I didn't see what he was looking for."

"Take this to Denis, tell him the sea is under the floor. Got it!" Bonkers cried enthusiastically, racing up the stairs quickly enough to leave a little puff of smoke trailing behind him. Too quickly, in fact, for Miranda to correct him. Oh well, she though as she shrugged her shoulders and pressed the black ball-point pen to the forms in front her. Denis will hopefully understand what I intended Bonkers to say. He's used to him.

Miranda settled her chin on her fingers. She'd never, ever trusted Lilith DuPrave, who despite trying to have her killed and numerous other crimes kept slipping out of any sort of long prison stay. It was possible the computers had been "stolen" as an inside job, to keep certain information from legally having to go public. It was certainly a possibility. Perhaps she'd bring it up to Denis on the ride home, if the possibility hadn't already occurred to him.

As Miranda returned to her paperwork, she didn't notice the silver cockroach intensely watching her from a crack in the ceiling. 

~

To be Continued… (With or without reviews)


	2. White Light

Bonkers wasn't in much of a mood to deal with cockroaches, either. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" he sing-sang. In his left paw he clutched a blue bottle marked with a big black bug, surrounded by a circle that had been crossed off. In other words, a can of toon bug-spray.

A knock on the door sent him skittering to his feet, but not before he slammed his head into the table and knocked a decorative vase of flowers over upside-down onto his head. It fit firmly on, the neck of the bottle surrounding Bonker's own neck like a tight sweater. Staggering and making weird cat-like noises, Bonkers made for the door, pulling it open while trying to rip the offending vase off his head at the same time.

"Bonkers?" A gentle female voice rang in his waterlogged ears. "Do you need some help?"

His heart skipped about a kabillion beats. Fawn! The lovely, precious, adoring, did he mention lovely, Fawn was visiting HIM! And he had a stupid vase on his head!

"Just cleaning the inside of this vase!" he cried, trying to sound as much like he meant to have his head stuck up it as possible.

"Do you need any help?" Fawn asked, genuinely concerned for her somewhat eccentric friend's safety.

"Nah, I'm doing fine!"

"Are you sure? I can help pull it off…"

"I've got it!" Bonkers declared, yanking hard right as Fawn put her small hands on it to help him. He managed to pop it off right at the perfect time to startle Fawn and throw himself off balance. In one less than graceful swoop he knocked into her and sent both of them sprawling onto the cheap carpet of his mansion motor home.

Lifting his head, he found himself nose to nose with Fawn. Her deep, brown eyes reflected surprise, as well as perhaps a little bit of embarrassed happiness. Her cheeks turned a deep red as she pushed him off her lap, adjusting her now off-kilter pink headband.

"Fawn, what a surprise! My place is a mess! Let me clean it! A lady shouldn't have to sit on this awful couch!" He declared, more as one word than an actual sentence, sweeping a pile of unwashed uniform tops off the couch to make a Fawn-sized spot to sit in the chaos zone that was his home.

Fawn smiled ever so slightly. "Thank you, but I can't stay long. I have to work tomorrow. I just came by to ask…"

Bonkers leaned forward on his toes. His hands were clutched over his chest, trying to stop his thudding heart from jumping into his throat. "To ask…"

"If you're done with my DVD."

Bonkers, mentally at least, dissolved into a puddle of ink and paint. "Yeah, sure… it was really great. I liked it," he said, passing the object of interest from her to him. His gloves brushed against her fingertips for a second, causing him to blush and her to give him another of her timid, gentle smiles. 

"I'm glad you did. See you some other time?"

"Yeah, that would be great…" he said as the door shut behind her. Damn. Why, why didn't the words ever come out when he needed them? Why couldn't he just… ask her out? He hadn't nearly gotten himself killed delivering all those spatulas for nothing!

Outside the door, Fawn wondered the same thing. "Why don't you ever call me?" she wondered aloud as she stepped down the winding driveway. "Can it be that you like Miss Kitty better? Or maybe… I'm just invisible Fawn," she whispered to herself as she vanished into the strangely bright darkness of a Hollywood night.

Elsewhere in the city, Miranda was aware of the fact that she was dreaming. Dreaming, or lost somewhere within the psychotic confines of Studio 13. After all, donuts did not fall out of a green sky in the logical world dominated by human thought and physical laws.

She'd had this dream before. "Baabara?" Miranda called into the darkness, squinting in attempt to see further into the distance. "Baabara? Are you out there? Hello?"

Her voice echoed off seemingly empty, endless hallways. She walked slowly down the halls, watching closed doors move past on either side. She tried the doors. Every last one was locked tight, and she didn't know where to find the key.

In time, the hallway did end. It ended in an empty hole, stretching as far as her sparkling baby blue eyes could see. A cold wind blew out of the hole at her, blowing her overly yellow-blonde hair around to the point where it was almost completely horizontal. 

"Miranda!" her dead father's voice called, and then she woke up.

The window was open at it had started to rain, sending a cold wind into the room and up the thin sheets on her bed, freezing her bare arms and legs. Muttering to herself about having to get better screens, Miranda stormed over to the window and slammed it shut. 

Peering into the darkness, she saw a pair of crows huddled together, battered by the rain. Miranda wondered if crows formed mated pairs, or if the two were merely trying to use one another as shelter from the blinding rain and driving winds. Still, having someone, any someone, to weather a storm with you was far better than doing it alone. She knew that all too well.

Miranda studied the small "promise stone" ring on her head. It had been a present from the brown haired, bright-eyed young officer named Denis. They'd been together since he'd broken up with his last girlfriend, whom he'd met after helping Bonkers rescue her from a date-kidnapping porcupine. Despite the fact that Miranda was almost two years his senior they'd really hit it off, leading far beyond kissing at the front door but not far enough to yield an engagement ring yet, or in the foreseeable future.

"When I get my big promotion I'll have time for you again! I have to work really hard now if I want to get it, and when I get it, I'll get a raise. Once I have my raise, we can be happy. I promise." It was a promise that took an entire paragraph to write out but that Miranda had heard so many times that she didn't have to write it to recall it word for word. 

It seemed something her happiness was always on hold for something. A promotion, a better assignment, another day…

Several loud banging noises drew her attention as she was returning to bed. Miranda froze in place, knowing those sounds anywhere or any time, even with thunder roaring outside. Gunshots!

Throwing her coat and her shoes over her pajamas she ran out into the street, gun drawn. She'd dialed 9-1-1 but she hadn't had time to explain the situation to them, as she didn't want the ones that were shooting to get away.

Mud sloshed beneath her shoes as she cut across her yard, jumping over her yard fence and landing lightly on the rain-soaked sidewalk. Another shot sounded, tearing through the night air. Wet gun drawn and ready, Miranda shot through the pouring rain. She could hardly keep her eyes open as large droplets struck her face.

She was, perhaps, defying every police code of conduct she knew of by pursuing the shooters alone in the rain in her pajamas, but she wasn't about to let them get away if she could help it. She could only hope she'd arrive to the situation in time…

Lightning flashes illuminated two fleeing figures in the darkness. "Freeze, police!" she shouted. "Stay where you are!" 

Neither figure seemed to care, if they could even hear her over the rushing torrent of rainfall. Her shoes slapping hard against the pavement she ran after the darting forms.

A blinding flash of purple-white light stopped her dead in her tracks, throwing her a good five feet on her back. Her nightgown and the back of her coat tore open from the impact of sliding across brick. Even her pale skin was not spared, her dark blood intermixing with the rain pouring down from overhead.

The cuts hurt like hell. Miranda staggered to her feet, clutching a battered aluminum trash can for support. She'd fared far better than the two men she'd been pursuing; all that remained of them for the evidence teams were their guns and their silver fillings.

The two crows, watching the situation as Miranda clung to the burned brick wall of the alley, turned to one another and took wing, departing into a sky flashing with brilliant streaks of lightening. They had a report to make. 


End file.
